Thrown-away Child

cheek. Her neck smelled lightly of orange. She turned the other cheek for equal treatment, then gave me a kiss of her own—on the lips.
    Violet cast an approving glance at Ruby, and asked, “Girl, this one always talk so flowery?”
    Ruby answered, “On the blarney meter, Detective Hockaday gives good value.”
    In hearing this from her daughter, there was a catch in Violet Flagg’s voice. Only a cop would notice. She recovered quickly and smiled at me. “Come along into my parlor, Mr. Po-liceman,” she said. “Have some lemonade. Bring along your pretty wife.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Flagg.”
    “You best call me Mama like all of them do.” Violet said this as we followed her through the door. There was no hallway or foyer to her house, just a simple, square parlor with brown-and-beige linoleum tiles and a round braided rug and a pair of windows looking out to the street. At the back end of the parlor—behind a partial wall of family photographs dominated by a yearbook portrait of Ruby that could have doubled for Angela Davis circa 1968—was a staircase. Ahead of where I stood was an archway to the kitchen. In the middle of the parlor, Violet stopped. “Oh, it’s going to be so nice with the whole family here.”
    “Everyone’s coming over?” Ruby asked. “Tonight?”
    “Sure this evening. Going to be enough Negroes around here to make a Tarzan picture.”
    “Janice is coming, too?”
    “Of course Janny be here. Your sister and all of them coming, unless…” Mama’s voice trailed off as she crossed over to the foot of the staircase. She peered up the steps and cocked an ear, listening for something. But there were only the three of us in the house to make any noise.
    This peering and listening took but a second. Then Mama cut a look to Ruby. “Janny’s coming here with all best intentions. I want you to be good to each other. Hear me?”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    I asked myself questions. Ruby and her sister, Janice, were on the outs with each other? What other little family secrets lay ahead? Could this be why Ruby’s been acting so strangely?
    “I don’t want to even hear no hurting words,” Violet added to her warning. “Least you girls can do is put aside your squabbling and teasing and just enjoy what I’ve been cooking up.” She was through with Ruby and looked my way now. “We going to have a party so fine, with much good Creole food, it’s going to be dangerous being a chicken around here. What you like being called? Neil? But then you got a nickname, too, so I hear.”
    “Hock,” Ruby answered for me. “That’s what all his cop friends call him. Also his so-to-speak clients. Sometimes I call him Irish.”
    “I believe I call you Neil.” Mama motioned for us to sit down on a couch under the lacy windows, which did. She smoothed back her linen skirt and patted her marcelled hair and sank into an easy chair next to an oak lamp table spilling over with photograph albums. She shook her head up and down decisively. “I like Neil, it’s a pretty name. A real fly name, like the youngsters say.”
    As for me’ I liked Mama’s cottony voice and Louisiana accent. Pretty came out purdy, with you was witch yew, and Lord was La. Her sound was soothing and natural. I imagined her in moonlight, sitting out on the steps with a paper fan, nodding and calling out hello to neighbors as they slowly passed by.
    Mama’s soothing voice made me feel a very long way indeed from the snarl of Manhattan. I enjoyed the distant feeling. But that soon passed as she popped me a question as straight and hard as a New Yorker’s elbow at rush hour.
    “Now that you gone and married my daughter, now that you part of my family—suppose you tell me all you know about us Negroes.”
    “Mama, for God’s sake—!”
    “Hush, Ruby, else you ain’t going to hear Officer Neil say what he thinks about the sweet brown berries of the world.”
    “He’s a detective, Mama.”
    It was comforting of Ruby to clarify my rank, less so to see the skeptical smirk on her face as she waited for me to answer her mother’s blunt question. I was struck stupid and speechless, with blood rushing to my face to make me pink as the heart of a Paddy’s fried steak. Also I was being stared at by two nearly identical sets of African eyes, reduced from ebony to hazel down through the years of an American heritage involving rape somewhere along the rude line.
    “Come on now, boy. You surely know some about talking.” There was the